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This portion of the story contains intensely disturbing themes and imagery that may be unsettling to sensitive readers. It explores the concept of a dystopian world ruled by beings of incomprehensible cruelty and power, where suffering is perpetual and escape is impossible. The narrative is dark, filled with grotesque descriptions of violence, psychological torment, and the unyielding oppression of its characters.
Specific Trigger Warnings:
- Body Horror: Several instances of grotesque physical transformation, fusions of man and machine, and disturbing imagery involving the manipulation of human form.
- Mental and Emotional Abuse: The story explores psychological manipulation, torment, and the fear-induced obedience of characters who are subjected to constant power imbalances.
- Death and Erasure: Death is depicted in extreme forms, with some characters being erased from existence entirely, including the obliteration of memories.
- Surreal and Disturbing Imagery: Expect strange, disorienting landscapes and mind-bending concepts that may unsettle the reader’s sense of reality.
- Existential Dread and Cosmic Horror: The story delves into the unknown and the unknowable, with a looming sense of inevitable destruction and the breakdown of reality.
- Unrelenting Oppression: The characters live under the rule of seemingly omnipotent, tyrannical beings who exact control without mercy, leading to despair and hopelessness.
- Extreme Violence: The story includes graphic depictions of physical harm, such as mutilation, burns, and torture, as well as the haunting image of characters surviving cruel and inescapable pain.
- Psychological and Emotional Trauma: Characters experience prolonged mental and emotional suffering, exacerbated by their helplessness in a world where death is denied and survival is only further torment.
- Existential Despair and Hopelessness: The overwhelming theme of perpetual suffering and the inability to escape from torment, leading to a bleak and unrelenting sense of dread.
- Grim Depictions of Torture: Victims are not merely killed; they are tortured in ways that strip away their identities and sanity, remade into twisted versions of themselves as a form of punishment.
- Inescapable Oppression: The characters live under a tyrannical regime where they are forced into servitude, their autonomy destroyed by cruel and oppressive rulers, and every act of defiance is met with horrific retribution.
- Dark Humor and Cruelty: The characters use humor, but it is steeped in bitterness and cruelty, often making light of suffering, pain, and the tragic fates of others. This can be unsettling for readers sensitive to humor derived from trauma.
- Toxic Environment: The world itself is depicted as an ever-present threat, with dangerous terrain, poisoned air, and creatures that are hostile or indifferent to the suffering of the inhabitants. The landscape is described as both oppressive and alive in a threatening, hostile manner.
- Child Endangerment and Trauma: A child is mentioned in the narrative, with references to the disturbing reality of the environment they inhabit. There are hints at the emotional and physical toll that such an existence takes on the young, including disturbing comments about the child’s fate and what may have drawn the Methuselah’s attention.
- Cynical Commentary on Power and Survival: The narrative includes cynical reflections on power, survival, and the role of individuals in an oppressive system, with characters casually discussing their enslavement by the Methuselah and the grim reality of their existence under tyranny.
- Loss of Identity and Power: Characters who were once powerful—kings, healers, conquerors—reflect on the loss of their former identities, now reduced to mere shadows of their past selves. The theme of being stripped of personal power and reduced to a puppet of the Methuselah is pervasive.
- Cynicism and Cruelty: There are repeated instances of harsh, cynical humor as characters mock one another’s suffering and diminish the importance of life and death. Some characters display cruelty or indifference to the pain of others.
- Foul Language and Insults: Characters engage in harsh exchanges, including insults and demeaning language. The dialogue often includes crude or darkly humorous remarks about the suffering of others.
- Dehumanization: The theme of characters being reduced to mere “pawns” or “tools” is central. The Methuselah are portrayed as beings who manipulate others without regard for their humanity, stripping them of their dignity and purpose.
- Self-harm and suicidal themes: Characters engage in discussions of self-harm, attempts at suicide, and an inability to escape perpetual suffering, with some disturbing examples of failed attempts.
- Death and immortality: The concept of immortality is explored in a cruel and twisted manner, where characters cannot escape death, leading to a form of eternal suffering.
- Psychotic behavior and moral corruption: Some characters display deeply corrupt, psychotic, and sadistic behavior, and their actions are narrated in a disturbing manner.
- Morbidity and Disturbing Imagery: Frequent references to death, decayed and rotting flesh, and the consumption of repulsive, infested food.
- Substance Abuse: Consumption of foul, toxic liquids and food, as well as characters engaging in self-destructive behavior due to the harsh environment.
- Cultural and Physical Degradation: Characters are subjected to extreme physical and mental degradation in a dystopian, cruel world.
- Sexual Violence/Exploitation Themes: While not directly shown, there are undertones of dehumanization and exploitation of vulnerable characters.
- Mental illness: References to madness, broken minds, and the collapse of memory and identity.
- Cults and twisted belief systems: Characters exhibit warped or disillusioned views on life, existence, and purpose, which may be unsettling for some readers.
This section maintains the story’s unrelenting dark tone and should be approached with caution by those sensitive to themes of extreme violence, suffering, and psychological trauma. Readers who may be disturbed by casual cruelty, loss of identity, and the portrayal of a harsh, hostile world may find this content difficult to process. This content may be overwhelming to those who have experienced trauma or have sensitivities to themes of pain, death, and existential nihilism.
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Status: Draft #1
Last Edited: November 26, 2024
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The world beyond Eternity’s Edge was a place of fleeting empires and brittle thrones, a fragile stage where mortals and gods alike played their endless games of power and decay. But within the forbidden borders of Eternity’s Edge, a dominion cut off from the laws of nature and reason, ruled the Methuselah—a family whose very name sent shivers into the marrow of history. To speak of them was to invite ruin; to defy them was to embrace death. Yet even death, with all its certainty, was a mercy they rarely granted.
Eternity’s Edge did not belong to the world—it was a splinter of reality severed by the Methuselah themselves, carved with unnatural precision from the veins of existence. Time was warped here, folded and twisted upon itself, making days feel like centuries and centuries pass in the blink of an eye. The air was thick with a metallic tang, as if the space itself bled under the weight of its masters. The sky hung low, bruised and scarred, streaked with hues of decay. The land was a mosaic of grotesque beauty, where jagged blackened spires stabbed upward and rivers of molten silver carved impossible paths through endless, screaming forests.
Beneath this corrupted sky stood the Sanctuary—a sprawling citadel of obsidian and bone, its architecture an affront to logic. Towers spiraled in unnatural geometries, doors opened into abysses, and corridors stretched into the infinite. The walls seemed to breathe, whispering secrets too terrible to name, and the floors pulsed with a rhythm like the beating of a heart. This was the home of the Methuselah, a dynasty of unrelenting chaos and unmatched perfection.
No one outside the Edge knew their true faces. To most, they were nightmares given form, pale phantoms cloaked in shadow. Their eyes, it was said, glowed like dying stars, burning with the cold intelligence of beings who had seen too much, lived too long. They were beyond age, beyond the limits of flesh and bone. Some whispered they had transcended humanity entirely, their blood replaced by something darker and more potent, their bodies enhanced with horrors too intricate to comprehend. They moved like wraiths, their precision sharper than any blade, their strikes inevitable. To see a Methuselah was to glimpse the perfect predator.
The Methuselah took no sides because there were no sides to take—only obstacles to crush, pawns to manipulate, and resources to devour. They required no allies, for alliances were weaknesses wrapped in pretenses of strength. They killed with the same ease they breathed, their hands steeped in the blood of kings and beggars alike. When they turned on their own, it was not betrayal—it was merely correction, the excision of an imperfection in their otherwise flawless lineage.
The people of Eternity’s Edge knew better than to love them. They served because they had no choice. To disobey was to vanish, your existence erased so completely that even the memory of you was snuffed out. The Methuselah were gods, devils, and everything in between, and they demanded obedience with an aura of calm that made their fury all the more terrifying. Yet for all their tyranny, they provided for their subjects, as long as those subjects bent the knee and bled when commanded. Food, shelter, knowledge—it was given generously, though always laced with the unspoken threat that it could be taken just as swiftly.
The Methuselah’s experiments on their subjects were as legendary as their cruelty. The citadel’s laboratories reeked of antiseptic and coppery blood, a nauseating blend of sterility and carnage. Rumors abounded of grotesque fusions of man and machine, of souls harvested and bound to lifeless husks, of children raised in vats and molded into killers before they could form thoughts of their own. Some returned to serve, their eyes hollow and glowing with the unmistakable mark of Methuselah craftsmanship. Others were never seen again, their screams echoing long after their bodies were consumed.
To the outside world, the Methuselah were monsters, but within Eternity’s Edge, they were an inevitability. Their rule was not questioned because there was no alternative. They were the architects of despair, the sculptors of suffering, and the masters of all they surveyed. Their ambition was infinite, their purpose unknowable. And though they rarely spoke of it, their eyes were always fixed beyond the Edge, scanning the horizons of reality for something greater, something no one else could see.
For those who dared to look deeper, there was a question, buried like a splinter in the collective consciousness of Eternity’s Edge: Why? Why did they strive? Why did they kill and conquer, experiment and annihilate? What did the Methuselah, the strongest family of all time, fear?
But such questions were the seeds of madness, and in Eternity’s Edge, madness was a mercy no one could afford.
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The multiverse sprawled in infinite splendor, a kaleidoscope of realms teeming with gods and monsters, heroes and tyrants, civilizations rising and falling in eternal cycles. Each world was a fragment of boundless creation, stitched together by the fragile threads of time, magic, and will. And yet, within this vast, uncharted expanse, there was one name spoken only in hushed tones, one force whose mere mention was enough to still the breath of rulers and gods alike: The Methuselah.
They were a whisper in the dark, a shadow lurking in the forgotten corners of existence. No one knew their origins, no one dared seek their purpose. To utter their name was to summon dread; to invoke their wrath was to court oblivion. For those who ruled—the omnipotent deities and unyielding monarchs who believed themselves invincible—the Methuselah were a grim reminder that there was always a higher power. An absolute.
Legends of the Methuselah were sparse, but their impact was undeniable, carved into the bones of history like wounds that refused to heal. Across countless universes, ruins bore silent testimony to their passage: kingdoms swallowed whole, celestial hierarchies shattered, laws of reality warped into grotesque mockeries of themselves. The tales were always the same—worlds undone not by armies, but by a single figure. One. Always one. A lone Methuselah was enough to erase an entire civilization, to turn gods into ash and empires into dust. And should more than one appear… no story survived to tell of it.
Their power was incomprehensible, a force beyond the grasp of even the most enlightened minds. They did not fight wars; they rewrote them. A Methuselah did not conquer with brute strength alone—they reshaped the fabric of existence to suit their will. A battlefield could twist into an endless abyss; time could fracture, trapping their enemies in eternal loops of torment. A single gesture could unravel the spells of ancient sorcerers or silence the divine voices of pantheons. The very laws that governed life, death, and the cosmos bent and shattered beneath their touch.
And yet, their motivations remained a riddle. The Methuselah acted with cold detachment, their reasoning obscured by a veil of apathy and silence. Were they architects of chaos, sculpting destruction for its own sake? Or did they serve a purpose so far beyond mortal comprehension that it seemed indistinguishable from madness? No one knew. All that was certain was their indifference. They could arrive without warning, destroy without hesitation, and vanish without a trace. To be spared by them was not a mercy; it was an afterthought.
There were no patterns to their actions, no logic to their alliances or betrayals. The Methuselah might strike down an empire only to shield another, obliterate a realm while allowing its neighbor to flourish. Even those who had glimpsed their power—those few souls who had survived encounters with these entities—could offer no insight. Their stories were fragmented, tinged with hysteria. Some described the Methuselah as pale wraiths wrapped in shadow, others as beings of impossible beauty whose presence burned like staring into the heart of a star. Always, their eyes were said to shine with an unfathomable light, cold and unblinking, as though they saw through the very soul of the multiverse itself.
Among the rulers of the multiverse, the Methuselah were a cautionary tale, the unspoken boundary that no one dared to cross. To challenge them was not bravery; it was suicide. Entire pantheons had vanished into oblivion for daring to test their strength. Universes had been unraveled, their threads severed with precision too cruel to be random. Even the boldest of conquerors, the most arrogant of gods, spoke of the Methuselah with a mixture of fear and reverence. They were not merely powerful—they were inevitable.
But what terrified the multiverse most was not their strength or their ruthlessness. It was their silence. The Methuselah did not gloat. They did not explain. They did not demand tribute or obedience. They simply acted, leaving the ruins of their will in their wake. Their actions, seemingly random and motiveless, hinted at a purpose so vast and alien that it defied understanding. And that was their true power: the unknown.
For those who dared to imagine the unthinkable—those who wondered what might happen should more than one Methuselah appear—the thought alone was enough to drive them to madness. It was not a question of survival, but of whether reality itself could endure their combined presence. If one Methuselah could rewrite the laws of existence, what might a family of them achieve? No one wanted to know.
The Methuselah were the unyielding constant in an ever-changing multiverse, a force of nature as indifferent as a hurricane and as destructive as the end of time. And so, their name endured, whispered in the dark corners of creation, a name both feared and revered. They were the Absolutes, the supreme authority above all and everyone, the monsters that kings and gods alike prayed never to see.
Because when the Methuselah appeared, there were no heroes. Only silence.
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Eternity’s Edge was a paradox, a wound carved out of the multiverse itself, suspended in a void where neither time nor space dared to fully exist. It was a fragment of unreality, a sanctuary for monsters, a prison for the damned. No sun lit its jagged horizons; no stars pierced its blood-soaked skies. The heavens themselves were an oppressive shade of crimson, swirling and fractured like veins running through diseased flesh. Lightning forked in endless, silent tempests, illuminating a landscape that breathed with malevolence. There was no life here, not as anyone understood it. Only survival—and even that was uncertain.
The city sprawled beneath this apocalyptic sky, an impossibility of shifting architecture and unending torment. Buildings of impossible geometry loomed in every direction, their twisted spires reaching hungrily toward the bleeding heavens. Their surfaces were a patchwork of blackened steel, shattered glass, and pulsating organic matter that seemed to twitch and squirm as though alive. Streets carved from obsidian writhed underfoot, rippling like black tar, swallowing the unwary without warning. The air carried the stench of rot and ozone, so thick and suffocating it burned the lungs. Yet, for all its horrors, the city did not sleep. It pulsed with a cold, unyielding energy, alive in its own dreadful way.
Everywhere was danger, and nothing was merciful. The environment itself seemed to hunger for destruction, as if the land bore the same sadistic tendencies as its rulers. The very ground beneath the citizens’ feet could turn against them—splintering into jagged shards that pierced flesh and bone, or melting into viscous acid that consumed its victims with agonizing slowness. The rivers were no better. Veins of molten silver wove through the districts, their waters impossibly hot, yet alive with strange parasites that crawled free of their infernal depths to burrow into anything warm and breathing. Even the sky was an executioner: the storms that raged overhead carried winds sharp as razors, slicing through stone and flesh alike with unerring precision.
Death was everywhere, and yet it was forbidden.
The citizens of Eternity’s Edge—those chosen, or perhaps condemned, to exist here—found themselves bound to life in the cruelest of ways. No matter the wounds they sustained, no matter the agony inflicted by their surroundings, death refused to claim them. Severed limbs regrew, though imperfectly, leaving behind scars that burned with phantom pain. Flesh knitted itself back together in grotesque, unnatural patterns. Those who leapt into the depths of the molten rivers would awake on the shore moments later, their skin charred and sloughing, only to heal and endure once more. It was as though the Methuselah had rewritten the rules of mortality, ensuring that no one could escape their dominion—not even by succumbing to despair.
The districts themselves were no haven, each one a crucible of suffering ruled by a single Methuselah. Thirteen in total, they stood as monuments to the family’s tyranny, their boundaries marked by towers that bled light like an open wound. The First District, the capital, loomed above the others, its jagged skyline a crown of malice. This was the seat of the Methuselah leader, the one whose dominion extended over all others. From here, the rulers’ eyes stretched into every shadow, their authority absolute.
For all their power, the citizens of Eternity’s Edge were little more than prisoners. Strong enough to rule empires and rewrite history beyond these cursed borders, here they were reduced to playthings, bound by the whims of their cruel masters. They were chosen for reasons only the Methuselah understood, plucked from across the multiverse and forced into servitude. Some came willingly, lured by the promise of protection and purpose. Others were dragged here in chains, their resistance crushed beneath the weight of inevitability. But all were equal in their suffering, bound together by the shared agony of living under the Methuselah’s rule.
There was camaraderie in their despair, a brittle kinship forged in the fires of mutual hatred. They spoke in hushed whispers of the Methuselah, of the rulers they feared and loathed in equal measure. Yet no one dared to rebel. The consequences of disobedience were too horrific to imagine, let alone endure. The Methuselah were not merely rulers—they were gods of cruelty, their punishments precise and unrelenting. Those who defied them were not killed. No, death would have been too kind. Instead, they were remade—stripped of identity and sanity, their bodies twisted into grotesque parodies of life and set loose as warnings to all.
And yet, for all their hatred, the citizens could not deny the bitter irony of their existence. The Methuselah provided for them, ensured their survival amidst the endless dangers of Eternity’s Edge. Food, water, shelter—these necessities were granted with cold efficiency. The rulers cared nothing for their subjects’ well-being, yet they sustained them all the same. Perhaps it was a reminder of their dominion, a cruel game of control. Or perhaps it was something deeper, something no one dared to understand.
Here, in this fractured city beneath a bleeding sky, where death was forbidden and suffering eternal, life persisted. Not because it thrived, but because it was forced to endure. This was the will of the Methuselah, the ones who ruled beyond comprehension, the architects of agony. To live in Eternity’s Edge was to stand at the edge of madness, to teeter on the precipice of oblivion—and to know that even the void would not grant release.
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The crimson sky above Eternity’s Edge bled into the jagged, ever-shifting horizon, casting a sickly light over its streets of living stone. Somewhere in the distance, the shriek of something vast and unseen echoed—a sound that no longer drew attention from the seasoned locals. They had learned to ignore the cries of this place. Those were the least of their concerns.
In one of the city’s many labyrinthine alleys, a group of citizens gathered, their voices low, tinged with exhaustion, anger, and resignation. They were not friends. No one in Eternity’s Edge truly was. But here, among the damned, there was some comfort in shared suffering.
“Look at him. Still shaking.” The voice came from an older man, his face marked by deep lines that spoke of years under skies far brighter than these. His arm, a mass of scar tissue and mismatched cybernetic implants, pointed toward a young man who sat curled against the wall, his eyes wide and unfocused. “New ones are always the same. They think they’ve seen hell before this. They don’t know the meaning of the word.”
The young man’s lips trembled as he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. “I was a king… I was a king… I ruled over twelve kingdoms… They knelt before me…” His words dissolved into choked sobs.
The older man barked a laugh, cruel and humorless. “And now you kneel before the Methuselah. Welcome to the real hierarchy, your highness.”
“Shut up, Oren.” A woman, her voice sharp but weary, stepped forward. Her hair was matted with dirt and blood, her body draped in a patchwork cloak that concealed scars both fresh and ancient. “Let him adjust. It’s been… what? A week? Two? Give him time before the place breaks him completely.”
“Breaks him?” Oren scoffed. “He should hope it breaks him. That’s the only way you survive here—by letting it in. Fighting it just makes it worse.”
The woman turned to the young man, her expression softening. “Listen, kid. You’re not the first king to end up here. Won’t be the last. The Methuselah don’t care who you were. Emperor, god, hero, villain. Makes no difference. You’re just another pawn now, like the rest of us.”
“Speak for yourself, Farah,” came a third voice, smooth and mocking. A man leaned against a wall nearby, idly tossing a knife from one hand to the other. His eyes glinted like shards of obsidian. “I’m no pawn. I’m here by choice. The Methuselah gave me exactly what I wanted.” He grinned, showing teeth too sharp to be natural.
Farah’s glare could have cut through steel. “Choice? You call this a choice, Luka? You’re as trapped as the rest of us. Don’t kid yourself.”
“Oh, I don’t mind the cage,” Luka said, flipping the knife one last time before letting it vanish into his sleeve. “Not when it’s gilded. They fixed me, Farah. Gave me my sight back. You remember what I was before I got here, don’t you? Blind, half-dead, nothing but a killer no one wanted anymore. Now? I’m better than I ever was. If it means kissing their boots, so be it.”
Farah spat at his feet. “You’re disgusting.”
Nearby, a child no older than six watched the exchange with wide, unblinking eyes. Her small frame was wrapped in what looked like the remnants of a royal gown, the fabric torn and stained. She clutched a small, broken doll to her chest.
“Why do they do it?” she asked softly, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade.
Farah knelt beside her, her hardened features softening for a moment. “Why do who do what, sweetheart?”
“The Methuselah,” the girl said, her gaze turning toward the distant spire of the First District, a black monolith that seemed to pierce the bleeding sky. “Why do they keep us here? Why do they keep us alive if they hate us so much?”
The group fell silent. Even Oren’s biting words failed him. No one had an answer.
From a nearby shadow, a figure spoke, its voice low and gravelly, more a growl than a human sound. “Because they don’t hate us.” The speaker emerged, a hulking man with skin that looked as though it had been carved from volcanic rock. His eyes burned like embers. “They don’t feel anything for us. We’re tools, nothing more. Tools they’ve sharpened and shaped. And tools don’t get to decide when they’re put down.”
Oren snorted. “That’s a pretty way of saying we’re slaves.”
“No,” the man said, his voice rumbling like distant thunder. “Slaves can rebel. We’re worse than that. We’re… theirs.”
The young man, still trembling, looked up at them all. “But why? Why me? Why any of us?”
Luka grinned again, his expression cold. “Because you were strong enough to catch their eye. That’s the curse, kid. Being exceptional. The Methuselah don’t collect the weak. Only the ones who could’ve ruled the multiverse. They break us, keep us, use us, because they can. And you better get used to it.”
Farah sighed, standing and looking toward the distant horizon where the crimson sky churned like a festering wound. “Get used to it,” she murmured. “That’s the only advice you’ll ever need here.”
Around them, Eternity’s Edge groaned and shifted, the ground trembling as though alive. Above, the sky wept red, its storms swirling endlessly. And in the distance, the spire of the First District loomed, its shadow a constant reminder of who truly ruled this fractured, eternal hell.
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In the 12th District, far from the imposing shadow of the First District’s spire, the air was marginally less oppressive. Not that it was peaceful. There was no peace in Eternity’s Edge, only varying degrees of survival. The citizens gathered in loose groups along fractured streets that bled faintly glowing liquid from their cracks, their faces lit by the eerie red glow of the eternal sky.
A man leaned against a warped iron post, his once-pristine military uniform now tattered and stained with blood and ash. His medals, polished to an obsessive shine, were the only hint of his former station. He puffed on a cigarette that glowed an unsettling green, the smoke curling upward before dissipating into nothingness.
“You ever think about how this place wants to kill us?” he said to no one in particular, exhaling a plume of toxic smoke. “I mean, look around. The ground itself’s a death trap, the air’s probably poison, and don’t even get me started on the wildlife. Yet here we are. Alive. Because those damn Methuselah won’t let us die.”
“Morbid, Garris,” a woman replied, her voice dry as the cracked earth beneath their feet. She adjusted the high collar of her ornate gown, its golden embroidery a stark contrast to the wasteland around her. “Even for you.”
“Come on, Dahlia,” Garris said, grinning through yellowed teeth. “You’ve been here long enough to get it. Nothing kills us unless they say so. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Why go through all the trouble to keep us alive?”
“Entertainment,” a third voice chimed in. A wiry man with a mechanical arm sat cross-legged on a chunk of rubble, fiddling with the glowing wires that ran through his artificial limb. His clothes were patchwork, stitched together from fabrics that seemed to hail from a dozen different worlds. “We’re just their little puppets, dancing around in their sandbox. They probably watch us and laugh.”
Dahlia rolled her eyes. “If this is their idea of a joke, they’ve got a sick sense of humor.”
Across the way, a cluster of newcomers sat huddled together, their faces pale and drawn. One of them, a young woman still clad in the ceremonial armor of her fallen kingdom, clutched a broken sword like a lifeline. “This… this can’t be real,” she stammered, her voice trembling. “I need to get back. My people need me.”
A grizzled older man, his face obscured by a thick black hood, snorted. “Your people don’t need you. They’re probably dead. Or worse, they’ve forgotten you entirely. Time doesn’t work the same here, sweetheart. You’re as good as a ghost out there.”
The young woman’s eyes filled with tears. “But I—”
“She’s gonna cry,” someone muttered.
“Let her,” said another voice, this one sharp and laced with cruel amusement. “Might as well get it out of her system now. Crying’s a luxury you won’t have time for later.”
A child ran by, their small feet bare and bloodied from the jagged ground. They were laughing, the sound unnervingly high-pitched and manic. “Did you see it?” the child yelled to no one in particular. “The big thing in the sky? It looked at me! I think it liked me!”
Garris watched the child disappear around a corner and shook his head. “They get ‘em younger every year. Wonder what that one did to catch the Methuselah’s eye. Probably nuked their whole planet or something.”
Dahlia smirked, a cruel glint in her eye. “Or maybe they just wanted a pet.”
Nearby, a man with skin the color of burnished copper and a crown of twisted metal perched atop his head sat alone, staring into the distance. His robes, once resplendent with jewels and intricate embroidery, were now tattered and smeared with grime. He did not speak, but the others occasionally glanced at him, their expressions a mixture of disdain and pity.
“That’s King Varon, isn’t it?” one of the newcomers whispered.
“Used to be,” replied an older woman whose eyes glowed faintly blue, the result of some ancient enhancement. “Now he’s just another one of us.”
The newcomer frowned. “But he’s a legend. They say he united seven realms under his banner—”
“And now he’s here,” the woman interrupted, her voice flat. “Same as the rest of us. Legend or not, the Methuselah don’t care. He’s just another pawn in their game.”
The group’s dark humor flowed freely as the night deepened, if such a thing could be measured in Eternity’s Edge.
“Remember that time Varon tried to fight back?” Garris asked, his grin returning.
Dahlia chuckled, low and bitter. “Oh, I remember. Took on District Eleven’s Methuselah. Lasted all of five seconds before he was pinned to the ground like an insect.”
“Five seconds?” Luka called from the shadows. “That long? Must’ve been a slow day for them.”
The group erupted into laughter, though there was no joy in it. The sound echoed hollowly against the jagged walls of the city, swallowed by the endless void above. For a moment, the newcomers sat in stunned silence, unable to reconcile the horrors they faced with the casual cruelty of the veterans’ humor.
But eventually, even they would learn. In Eternity’s Edge, you laughed or you broke. And breaking wasn’t an option.
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The newcomers stumbled through the maze of twisted streets, their wide eyes darting from corner to corner as they tried to process the incomprehensible horrors surrounding them. The air itself seemed alive, thick and oppressive, and it pressed against their chests like an invisible hand. Their minds scrambled to grasp what they were seeing, but the overwhelming sense of wrongness stifled every thought, every rational understanding. They were no longer in their worlds, but in a place where time and space had no meaning.
A figure emerged from the shadows of a dilapidated building, its silhouette jagged and contorted, as though the very fabric of reality was struggling to hold it together. A long black coat, stained with years of blood and grime, flapped in the wind, revealing tattoos—runes—etched into the flesh, symbols that glowed with an unnatural light. The figure’s face was half-covered by a cracked helmet, but there was no mistaking the look in the hollow eyes beneath.
“Lost, are we?” The voice was dry, rasping, and edged with malice. “Welcome to Eternity’s Edge, where the time you knew is but a fleeting thought. A place where the dead live and the living… well, they don’t live for long.”
One of the newcomers, a woman with dark brown hair that clung to her scalp in damp clumps, stammered. “Who—what are you?”
The figure laughed, a sound like broken glass scraping over stone. “Me? I was once a conqueror, a king, a ruler of men. And yet now, I am nothing. Nothing but another soul trapped in the web of the Methuselah’s ambition.” The helmeted figure tilted its head as if it could see into her very soul. “Just like you will be. I think it’s funny, isn’t it? A king reduced to this.”
Another voice broke the silence, deep and warm, yet cold with the weight of experience. “Oh, you’ll get used to it. After all, we all did.”
The newcomer’s eyes flicked to the source of the voice—an elderly man, draped in a tattered cloak, his face weathered and worn, yet sharp with intelligence. His eyes gleamed unnervingly bright, despite the grayness of his hair. “Who are you?” the newcomer asked again, a tremble in her voice.
The man’s lips twisted into a knowing smile. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I was once the greatest healer of the Ninth Empire. I cured plagues, saved kingdoms, reversed death itself.” His smile deepened, darkening his features. “But none of it matters here. None of it.”
A third voice, young but hollow, cracked the air like thunder, its speaker’s hands trembling as they rested on the stone wall for support. “Reversed death?” The voice was thick with disbelief. “But… how can we… we’re all… alive here. How can we die if we’re here? If we’re alive, why—”
The elderly man laughed, a sound that echoed in the empty streets and sent a shiver down the newcomers’ spines. “Alive? Alive here? Let me tell you something, child. Alive is a concept you’ll forget soon enough. You may be breathing, but you’re as much dead as anything else that’s been brought here. This place doesn’t let us die, even when we beg for it. You’re never free here. And the Methuselah… they’re the ones who hold the strings.”
“How long have you been here?” the woman asked, her voice now barely above a whisper.
“Long enough,” the man replied, his gaze distant. “Long enough to see the truth of it all.”
The tension in the air tightened like a vice, as if the very space around them had become oppressive. More figures began to emerge from the shadows—shapes and faces too twisted to place. They moved silently, their eyes glowing faintly, unnatural.
“Don’t mind them,” Garris said, a voice behind the newcomers. He stepped into the dim light, his grin wide and unnerving. “They’re just a few of the legends. Don’t worry. You’ll meet more. In time.” His voice was cold, his laughter like the sound of shattering glass.
“Legends?!” The young man from the group stumbled forward, his expression a mix of confusion and fear. “These people… they’re alive? You’re saying—”
“They’re not alive in the way you think, kid.” Garris’ voice dropped, turning venomous. “They’re just memories, ghosts of their former selves. Some of them might’ve been gods, some might’ve been generals, rulers, scholars, or monsters. They’re all here, stuck, because they got caught in the web of those mad bastards. The Methuselah. They brought us here. To… what? I don’t even know anymore.”
He kicked a stone across the broken street, and the sound seemed to reverberate far too loudly in the oppressive silence.
“Reincarnation? Resurrection?” A woman’s voice came from a shadowed corner, dragging itself into the light, her eyes too knowing for someone her age. She wore a flowing robe, but its edges were ragged, as if time itself had eaten away at it. “Those terms don’t mean what you think they mean here. We’re the product of something beyond what you can understand. A twist in the multiverse, a ripple caused by the Methuselah’s whim. And here, in Eternity’s Edge, none of it matters. You live or die only by their will. Those of us who’ve been here longer than you know this truth already.”
A man, once regal and adorned in the silken robes of a high emperor, now staggered forward, his hand clutching at a bleeding gash across his chest. His eyes were wide with despair, but a bitter smile curled his lips. “I once ruled over a thousand cities. My word was law across worlds. But now… now I just sit here, like the rest of you, waiting for the next… test. You want to know what happened to me?” His voice was hoarse and broken. “I became a joke. Just like you will. The Methuselah made sure of it.”
“You’ll find out soon enough, darling,” came the voice of a woman with dark, delicate features, her eyes hollow, a stark contrast to her youthful appearance. She wore the remnants of what seemed to be an ancient battle uniform, stained and torn. “If you live long enough to see it. The Methuselah… they don’t care about your glory, your fame, or your struggles. They only care about one thing: absolute. And they’ll tear the entire universe apart to get it. Including us. We’re their pawns. Nothing more.”
The newcomers exchanged uneasy glances, their thoughts racing, their hearts pounding against their ribs. Every whisper, every laugh, every twisted revelation sent chills down their spines, the weight of their helplessness pressing down on them like a coffin lid.
“Welcome to Eternity’s Edge,” Garris sneered, his smile wild with madness. “It’s where legends go to die—and where the dead never rest.”
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The room was shrouded in shadow, but the faces gathered around the old stone table glinted with a cold, unnatural gleam—eyes hollow and distant, their smiles wide and unsettling, as if they had long since ceased to understand what it meant to truly feel. The air hung heavy, like the weight of a thousand unspoken curses, but the atmosphere was thick with something else: the familiarity of shared suffering. There was no comfort here, no safety, but they had learned to live within it—survive it, or at least pretend to.
The sound of a chair scraping across the floor shattered the silence, and a gaunt figure leaned forward, his thin lips curled into a grim grin. His skin was stretched tight across his bones, the lines of age etched deep into his face, but his eyes shone with a wicked gleam. He tapped his fingers on the table, making a sharp, rhythmic sound that resonated in the air like the ticking of a clock—each tick a reminder of the endless wait, the endless suffering.
“So,” he began, his voice a rasp that cut through the heavy silence, “how’s the latest crop of meatbags doing, eh?” His eyes flicked toward the group of newcomers huddled together in the corner, their faces pale and trembling as they tried to process the chaos around them. “The new ones always put on the best show. Such delicate little creatures, aren’t they?”
A woman, her face a smooth mask of serene detachment, chuckled softly. She wore the remnants of what looked like a regal gown—once gold, now stained a deep, unidentifiable color—and she toyed with the blade she kept at her side, the edge glinting in the dim light. “Oh, I do love a good breakdown. It’s like watching a flower bloom… just before it rots from the inside out.” Her smile widened as she ran the tip of the blade along her wrist, the skin parting easily, but no blood flowed. It simply healed as quickly as it was cut. “The screams are always the best part. Never gets old.”
Another man, who looked like a warrior of some forgotten era—muscles rippling beneath a blood-soaked tunic—barked out a laugh. His face was marred with scars, and his hands twitched with an energy that seemed almost too frantic. “You think that’s bad? You should’ve seen the last guy who tried to end it all. Thought he could hang himself from one of the city’s bridges, but the thing is, no one told him about Eternity’s Edge’s little… problem.” His grin spread, revealing teeth far too sharp for a man of his apparent age. “He fell for hours—hours! You can’t even die from hanging here. When his neck snapped, his body just kept hanging there, the bones grinding into dust, but the flesh? Oh, the flesh kept hanging. Alive the whole time, just twisting and stretching and tearing—”
“Wasn’t it worse for him when his legs got caught on the lower support beams, though?” A new voice interrupted. This one was a sharp, clear tone, cutting through the laughter. A woman with no visible eyes, only empty sockets, spoke from the shadows, her silhouette almost blending into the blackness of the room. She had been silent for a while, her hands folded neatly in her lap, as if the grotesque humor surrounding her was nothing more than background noise. “That’s when he realized… it doesn’t matter how many times your bones break. It doesn’t matter how many times your body shatters. As long as you’re here, you’ll never get to end it. Never die.”
The man who had been talking gave a derisive snort. “Oh, right, but what about the time I saw someone try to drown themselves in the toxic rivers of District 8? Those things are filled with enough corrosive venom to burn through a soul… but again, it didn’t kill him. It just—” He licked his lips, his eyes wide with the glee of someone who had seen too much. “It just melted off his skin. Slowly. But he kept breathing—gurgling through the stench of his own burning flesh. He was still alive when they pulled him out—mangled, twitching, and begging for death. Funny thing is, he got it. Eventually. Just not in the way he wanted.”
A low, rasping voice from the far end of the table broke the dark reverie. It was a man whose face seemed frozen in a permanent grimace, lips drawn tight over rotting teeth. “You’re all wrong. The best one was the guy who tried to use a blade to pierce his heart. We all saw it, didn’t we?” His skeletal fingers stroked the edge of his blackened beard. “He shoved that thing right through, didn’t even flinch, but the moment the blade hit his chest? Nothing. He bled out all over himself, but the heart kept beating. It didn’t stop. His body was trying to heal around the wound—flesh pushing out, forming new layers… so he kept bleeding, but didn’t die.” His hollow gaze flicked over to the newcomers, their faces pale as they sat in stunned silence. “You’ll learn soon enough, all of you. Pain is just a constant here. It’s like an old friend that never leaves. The only question is… how long it takes for your mind to crack first.”
The newcomers shifted uncomfortably, their eyes darting around the room. They tried to ignore the twisted faces, the laughter that wasn’t quite laughter, the stories of endless agony, but the horror of it all gripped them like a vice. One woman—the youngest of the group—shuddered and muttered, “I don’t get it. Why are you all… so casual about this?”
The woman with the gilded gown chuckled darkly, her fingers tightening around the blade. “Casual? You don’t get to choose, darling. You just survive… or you don’t. And if you survive, well, you adapt.” She leaned forward, the air around her vibrating with dark energy. “You stop thinking about how to die. You start thinking about how to live… if you can call it that.” Her lips curled into a sickening smile. “The Methuselah know how to make the suffering last forever, but they won’t ever let you escape it. The best you can hope for is that you become one of us: comfortable in the madness. A little numb to the screams.”
Another voice joined in, the man with the bloodstained tunic. “You’ll get used to it. Like we did. Eventually, pain becomes just another form of… entertainment. It’s like being an actor in a play. Except you can’t leave the stage, no matter how much you try.” He ran a hand through his dark, matted hair and turned toward the newcomers with a look of cruel amusement. “So, don’t be too quick to try anything… stupid. You’re gonna have plenty of time to think about it.”
“And when you try to end it,” the woman in the shadows added, her voice almost too calm for the horrors that surrounded them, “you’ll realize that Eternity’s Edge doesn’t let you die. You just suffer. Forever. Until it breaks you. And then you’ll wish you had died.”
The laughter that followed was low, hollow, a chorus of voices without warmth, echoing off the cold stone walls.
For here, in the Edge of Eternity, there was no end. Only endless, excruciating suffering.
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The streets of District 12 were like a decayed mockery of what could once have been considered normal. The air was thick with the acidic stench of rust, burning oil, and something foul that clawed at the back of one’s throat. The towering stone walls stretched far above, their surfaces marred by scars from countless battles and unspeakable horrors. Yet despite the oppressive gloom that filled the air, life in District 12 went on—if one could call it life.
A small group of newcomers shuffled along, eyes wide and filled with the raw, terror-stricken awe of those who had just been thrust into the unfathomable. They clutched one another’s shoulders as if trying to keep their feet steady against the overwhelming sense of impending doom. The veterans who guided them, however, seemed unbothered by the sheer grotesqueness of the world around them. It had become normal to them. Their eyes, though haunted, had long since given up any hope of escaping the horror. Instead, they had embraced it—perhaps as a form of survival, perhaps as something far worse.
“Welcome to District 12,” one of the veterans, a thin man whose face had long since faded into hollow bone, said with a crooked smile. His voice was harsh, worn like an old record, but there was something almost affectionate in the way he said it. “This place? It’s the least fucked up spot in Eternity’s Edge. Trust me, you should be thanking the stars you’re here.” He chuckled darkly, his laugh almost a cough. His hands, marked with countless burns and cuts, gestured to the decayed buildings around them.
Behind him, a woman who looked far older than she probably was—her face a patchwork of scars—nodded grimly. “Yeah. District 12’s where they dump the new meat, the fresh ones. You’re lucky. A lot of people end up in District 13, and you really don’t want to go there. It’s a goddamn slaughterhouse. Not just for people. Anything goes there. Monsters, beasts, things that shouldn’t even exist. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, just chaos. Even the Methuselah don’t bother with it. It’s locked down, permanently.” Her voice was almost detached, like she was reciting a nursery rhyme instead of speaking of something that had once made her tremble.
A young man—new, clearly—shuddered at the mention of District 13. “I don’t… I don’t understand. Why would they—”
“Why would they what?” The first veteran snapped back, his eyes glinting coldly. “Why would they lock it up? Because they can. The Methuselah don’t care about us, kid. We’re just… things. Tools. You think you’re special because you were pulled from your world? Nah. You’re just another plaything. District 12 is just the start. Look at the damn sky. The blood-red sky? It’s not just an aesthetic. That’s the color of everything here. Death. Pain. You don’t get to walk around thinking you’re immune to that shit, not here.”
He paused, letting the words settle over the newcomers like a weight they could never lift. The woman at his side turned her gaze toward the horizon—her eyes unfocused, lost to the dark past.
“District 1,” she said, her voice softening with a kind of reverence, but also fear, “that’s where the real rules are. Where the Methuselah’s home is. It’s the capital. The place you don’t wanna be. You don’t wanna end up there, trust me. It’s rigid. Orders. Structure. Everything’s tight. No mistakes. Every step, every move, every thought is controlled. It’s where they keep their precious ‘order,’ but it’s a prison. The worst part? It’s the hardest place to leave. People talk about moving up, but it’s not like you get to climb through merit. It’s all about them. They’ve got their rules. And you—well, you’ve got nothing.”
One of the newcomers, a woman whose hands trembled as if she could still feel the ripples of the shift from her home world to here, spoke up. “But, you said that the Methuselah don’t… they don’t care about us. What do they care about?”
The veteran smirked, but there was no joy in it. “They care about one thing: absolute power.” His eyes glinted with something ancient, something too knowing. “And ambition. They don’t play by our rules. They’ve got their own game. And it’s a game you can’t win, but you better play. If you try to ignore their game? Well, you’ll learn quickly that the rules here… they change when they feel like it. If you make them notice you in the wrong way? That’s when things get bad. That’s when you end up in District 13 or worse.”
The group fell into a heavy silence as they walked through the streets, their footfalls echoing off the cracked cobblestones. As they passed broken homes and ruined shops, a few locals went about their business—selling wares that looked like they had been scavenged from the bodies of things long dead, or perhaps simply decayed from the environment itself. Some seemed to ignore the newcomers completely, while others watched with hollow eyes, like the dead watching the living pass by.
A figure in the corner caught the newcomers’ attention. He sat hunched, his body obscured by a tattered cloak, the faint smell of rot emanating from his form. He wasn’t old, but he looked ancient, his face etched with lines of deep, unsettling exhaustion. He spoke without turning, his voice dry as bone. “You think you’re lucky, don’t you?” he rasped. “You think you’re free. Ha. District 12 is just a fucking breeding ground for the worst kind of survivors. And we all die the same way in the end. Broken. Twisted. Alive, but worse than death.”
One of the newcomers recoiled, but the veteran guiding them just shrugged.
“Don’t mind him,” he said. “We all got our little bits of insanity here. It’s how we survive. You don’t make it this long without losing something. Some people, they’re just too broken to hide it.” He turned to face the newcomers. “But listen. The Methuselah might let you live, but they’ll never let you forget. They make you remember. That’s what you’re in for. You’ll learn soon enough that the worst thing they do isn’t kill you—it’s that you can never truly die here. You just live. And live. And live.”
The silence that followed was thick and suffocating, punctuated only by the distant sounds of wailing, of tortured cries that echoed through the empty streets. The newcomers tried to look away, but it felt like the very walls of District 12 were closing in on them, pressing in on their fragile minds.
The woman with the patchwork gown turned back to them and smiled, but there was nothing kind in her eyes.
“Welcome to Eternity’s Edge,” she said softly, almost as if the words were a prayer—or a curse. “You’ll get used to it, or you won’t. But remember—don’t piss off the Methuselah. That’s the only rule that matters here.”
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District 12 was an anomaly in Eternity’s Edge—a twisted mockery of normalcy, a warped version of life where the mundanity of human existence clung to the shattered edges of reason. The District had its rhythms, its cycles, its patterns, yet all were suffocated by the suffocating, inevitable undertone of danger that hung in the air, as thick and palpable as the rotting fog that rolled in each night.
The environment itself was an ever-present predator. The air was dense with the weight of unseen, shifting currents—pulsating with the faint hum of energies that could, at any moment, lash out and obliterate entire blocks of homes. The earth beneath one’s feet seemed alive, breathing and pulsing like an open wound, ready to swallow anything that dared set foot upon it. The streets were cracked and uneven, filled with jagged rocks that seemed to crawl with a life of their own, whispering underfoot, threatening to lunge up at any moment and tear the flesh from bones.
But here, in District 12, life went on, for better or for worse. It had to.
The people of District 12 walked these streets like the living dead. Their eyes, once bright with the possibility of something better, were now hollow and empty, glazed over by years of unspeakable horror, and a resignation far deeper than despair. They were used to the tremors of the ground beneath them, used to the air’s electric charge, used to the constant ache of their bodies, burned and scarred from living in a place that existed outside time and space.
At the local tavern, The Bloodied Cradle, the smell of cheap alcohol and stale sweat wafted in the air. The patrons sat hunched at wooden tables, their faces obscured by thick shadows. Some of them had no faces anymore, the skin torn away by the toxic winds of the district, revealing grinning skulls, or worse, flesh that had fused to bone like some grotesque, twisted sculpture of a life that once had been.
A bartender with hands burned black by whatever liquid he poured—no one could tell what it was—wiped the counter with a rag that was more bloodstained than clean. He gave a weak smile to a newcomer, who had been hesitating in the doorway.
“You’ll get used to it. I know you’re looking for something to hold on to, but around here, you let go or get ripped apart,” the bartender said, his voice hoarse, as if the air itself had scraped it raw.
The newcomer barely nodded, eyes wide with fear, still unable to comprehend how they had ended up in this place. The door behind them slammed open as a pair of fighters, covered in cuts and bruises, staggered in, laughing through split lips. Their faces were swollen beyond recognition, but there was something about their laughter—an empty, hollow sound—that made the newcomer’s stomach turn.
“They’re just getting started,” the bartender added, as though reading their thoughts. “Boxing matches are a thing here. Some people fight for fun. Others, they fight because it’s the only way they know how to survive. You don’t go into the ring for the glory. You go in to feel something, because everything else here is numb.”
The fighting rings were legendary, gruesome, and terrifying. The rules were simple: there were no rules. The fighters, mostly locals who had spent years—sometimes millennia—learning the art of survival, battled in blood-soaked pits where the only thing that mattered was proving that you could endure the endless, searing pain. These weren’t boxers; these were monsters made by a world that demanded suffering as currency.
One of the fighters, a young man with eyes that seemed older than his years, stepped into the ring with a sort of practiced indifference. His body was adorned with tattoos of creatures that never existed, symbols of ancient knowledge and darker rituals that seemed to warp the air around him. The other fighter, a hulking figure with metal plates grafted to his body, cracked his knuckles with a sickening, metal-on-bone sound, his face twisted into a grin of pure violence.
The match was brutal. Bone cracked. Skin shredded. Blood soaked the floor in waves, yet neither fighter fell. It was a game of endurance. The victor wouldn’t be the one who landed the most blows, but the one who could survive the longest.
A distant shout from the crowd echoed through the tavern, a chorus of dark applause, as if the pain was what they had come to see. It was as though every one of them had swallowed the same bitter pill—the realization that they could never leave, never escape, so they simply embraced the agony and turned it into a form of twisted entertainment.
In the farthest corners of District 12, away from the crowded streets and brutal arenas, there were homes. Or what passed for homes, anyway. People lived here, or at least, they survived here. Houses were little more than hastily constructed shacks, built from salvaged materials, cobbled together with duct tape and the occasional unidentifiable bone. In these homes, families tried to live as normal a life as possible. But normal, in Eternity’s Edge, was a fleeting, fragile thing.
A mother, her eyes hollow with fatigue, sat by a small fire, stirring a pot of some thick, foul-smelling stew. Her children, their faces pale and covered in dirt, played in the corner, their laughter hollow and sharp, like the chirps of crows in the dead of night.
“Eat,” she said softly, her voice barely audible above the rumbling tremors beneath them. “Eat, and don’t ask questions. You’ll be fine. We always are.”
Her oldest child, no older than 10, stared at the steaming pot with suspicion. “What’s in it?” they asked, a flicker of curiosity in their voice.
“Does it matter?” she replied, her face momentarily breaking into a smile, but there was no joy in it—only resignation. “Eat. We don’t have time to be picky.”
They didn’t ask again.
Outside, the ground trembled once more, the earth groaning in protest as another ripple of energy surged through the district. It was a common sound—frequent and terrifying—and one that none of the locals seemed to acknowledge anymore. The tremors were simply part of life.
But some days were worse than others.
The district was not kind. The Methuselah that ruled it, apathetic and distant, offered no comfort. They gave their people everything they needed—food, water, shelter—but they demanded complete subservience in return. No questions asked. There were no gestures of compassion, no kindness. There were only the laws of eternity: survive, or become part of the cycle of death that never quite claimed its victims.
But even in the worst of it, there was a semblance of normalcy. Markets ran daily, peddling goods that had been salvaged or scavenged from unknown sources. It was all they had—the illusion of stability, of predictability. But nothing was stable in District 12. Not really.
“You’d better get used to the fights,” the bartender muttered as the newcomer turned to leave. “They’re the only thing that’ll make you feel alive here. The only thing worth living for.”
The door swung open with a creak. The smell of blood and sweat filled the air, mingling with the acrid scent of the toxic skies above. The newcomer stepped out into the streets of District 12, and for the first time, they felt the weight of Eternity’s Edge pressing in on them.
Welcome to life in District 12. Welcome to survival.
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The tavern, The Bloodied Cradle, was a sanctuary of suffering. A cesspool where the air was thick with a pungent cocktail of rotting flesh and foul, rancid stench—a scent so overpowering, so unnatural, it clung to the skin, embedding itself in the lungs, as though the very air had been tainted by an ancient curse.
At the counter, a pot of stew sat simmering, an unholy concoction that moved on its own. A wriggling mass of maggots and parasites churned the surface, feeding off whatever decayed flesh had been thrown into it. The texture of the broth was thick and gooey, a sludge that seemed to pulse, as though it had a heartbeat of its own. Eyeballs, shriveled and misshapen, floated on the surface, their lifeless stare staring back at anyone foolish enough to glance into the pot. Flies buzzed lazily, drawn to the stench of death that filled the room, adding an eerie ambiance to the grim scene.
The food was a grotesque reflection of the world around it. A bubbling tar-like mass floated in a bowl, its surface twitching and churning with what could only be described as live parasites, wriggling in macabre synchronization. A soft, sickening squelch rose as a strange beetle-like insect, its eyes gleaming a fluorescent red, skittered out from beneath a chunk of unrecognizable flesh, its mandibles clicking in the air. The drink, if it could even be called that, was a thick, black sludge served in chipped mugs that had long since been stained with the blood and bile of its countless patrons. The liquid seethed as though it were alive, its surface wriggling with a strange, organic movement, as if something—someone—was desperately trying to escape from it.
The newcomers recoiled, their faces twisting in disgust as they saw the others eating and drinking with an unsettling fervor. The veterans, seasoned by years—perhaps even centuries—of torment, consumed the vile concoctions with twisted relish, their cracked lips stretching into hollow grins as they swallowed down the nightmarish meals like it was a last supper. For them, this was normal. The horror of the food, the grotesque texture, the horrific taste—none of it mattered. They’d long ago stopped feeling the way the newcomers did.
One of the veterans, a man whose face was a patchwork of scar tissue, leaned forward with a drink in his hand. The glass was so thick with grime it looked as though it might shatter under the weight of its own filth. He raised it to his lips, slurping the foul substance down, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Come on, kid,” he sneered, his voice hoarse with too many years of screaming, too many nights of whispering in the dark. “Don’t tell me you’re squeamish. This is food. The good shit here. You won’t survive if you don’t learn to choke it down.” He chuckled darkly. “Hell, it might be the last time you ever eat if you keep acting like that.”
A woman sitting across from him, her eyes two hollow pits of darkness, licked the back of a spoon, scraping off the living parasites, watching with amused detachment. She turned her gaze to the newcomers, her lips curling into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“You think this is bad?” she asked, voice dripping with sardonic venom. “You haven’t even seen the real shit. The stuff that’ll make your stomach twist until it’s ready to chew through your spine. Eat up, darling. You’ll be begging for this shit in a few weeks.”
The newcomers could barely stomach the thought of putting any of the vile food to their lips. Their stomachs churned, rebelling at the mere sight of the writhing mess in front of them. They turned their eyes to their half-empty glasses of rancid, squirming liquid, then away again. How could anyone live like this? How could anyone just accept this kind of existence?
One of the newcomers, a tall man with a gaunt face and wide eyes, leaned forward, his voice shaking slightly despite his attempt at calm. “We’ve been through hell, yes, but this—this is too much. How—how do you live with this? How does anyone survive this… place?”
A gruff laugh bubbled up from one of the veterans. His lips curled into a snarl that could have belonged to an animal more than a man. His eyes glimmered with a mix of mocking cruelty and something else—something far deeper and more ancient.
“You survive because that’s all you can do,” he said, his voice low and amused. “You stop fighting it. You stop asking yourself why you’re here. You don’t think. You don’t feel. You just—survive.” He slammed his mug down on the table with a sickening thud. “And you do whatever it takes to stay alive. Even if it means eating this,” he gestured to the wriggling mass on his plate, “because you know what? It’s not like you’re gonna die. Not here. You might wish you could. But you can’t.”
The group fell into a strange silence, their eyes flicking from the newcomers to the horrors that surrounded them. It was a dark camaraderie, an understanding forged in the shared torment of this hellish place. No one could escape. Everyone here was trapped.
After a long pause, another veteran—her face hidden beneath a veil of cracked skin and tattered cloth—leaned in, her voice rasping as if it hadn’t been used in years.
“You’re lucky you ended up in District 12, kid,” she said, her eyes narrowing, predatory. “The real horrors… that’s District 13. Ever heard of it?”
The newcomers blinked, their curiosity piqued, their rational minds finally pushing past the grotesque tableau before them. “District 13?” one asked. “What’s that place like?”
A few of the veterans chuckled, dark humor spilling from their cracked lips like venom.
“You could call it the pit of Eternity’s Edge,” the scarred man said, slurring his words slightly. “It’s chaos incarnate. A nightmare you can’t wake from. Only the Methuselah can go there. They use it for… well, I don’t know what they use it for, but they treat it like their personal garden, their training ground, their zoo. Some people joke that they keep their pets there. Don’t let the idea of ‘pets’ fool you, though—these creatures, these beasts, they’re beyond anything you’ve ever seen. And the environment? Don’t even try to survive there.”
“You can’t even move in District 13,” the woman added, her voice dripping with contempt. “You think you can fight your way out? No. You get swallowed whole by the land itself. The creatures? They’ve been bred for destruction. The Methuselah don’t need to bother with it, because their only rule is ‘stay out of the way’. The rest of us? We just die if we go near it.”
“Stay out of the way,” the scarred man repeated, a twisted smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “That’s the key here. The only rule you’ll ever need to know. Stay out of the way of the Methuselah. Because they don’t give a damn about you. They never will.”
The veteran’s laugh was cold and lifeless, and the rest of the tavern joined in. The sound of their laughter, dry and brittle, echoed around the room like the caw of vultures.
The newcomer’s face grew pale, but it wasn’t fear anymore—it was understanding. This was not a place where survival meant getting away. It meant accepting the cruelty, accepting the suffering, and living it—no, thriving in it. Anything else was foolishness.
The bartender, who had been silently listening from behind the counter, tapped the edge of his glass with a dirty rag and shrugged.
“District 13’s locked off, kid. And even if it wasn’t? You wouldn’t stand a chance.” His voice was flat, emotionless, just another piece of the bleak puzzle that was District 12.
Another veteran raised a glass, toasting the newcomers with a dry, brittle chuckle.
“To survival,” he muttered, before slamming the drink back. The liquid bubbled up as though it were alive, like something was trying to claw its way out.
“Yeah,” the bartender added, his voice trailing off into the uncomfortable silence that followed. “To surviving until you can’t anymore.”
And so, life—if it could be called that—went on in District 12. The newcomers looked around, their minds churning, as the others went on with their meal, their misery, their endless suffering. There was no escape. Not for anyone.
═════════════════
The tavern hummed with an eerie, heavy stillness as the newcomers slowly leaned forward, their faces grim, their eyes wide with a mixture of disbelief and curiosity. They could no longer ignore the overwhelming stench of decay, the wriggling, pulsating messes of food and drink that festered in front of them. But there was more pressing knowledge to be gained—knowledge that might lead them to escape, or at least help them make sense of the horrors they had been thrust into.
A tall, gaunt figure with yellowed, cracked skin and a voice as dry as dust took a long gulp from his glass. The liquid inside hissed and bubbled, a sound almost too vile to endure. He leaned back, savoring the moment, before letting out a raspy laugh, as if amused by the newcomers’ hesitation to touch the grotesque meal before them.
“You want to know about the Methuselah, huh?” he muttered, wiping his lips with a filthy sleeve. “Aren’t you curious little things, aren’t ya?” His voice was thick with bitterness, the words slowly slurring into a growl. “Well, you’ll hear all sorts of things about them, but the truth? Nobody knows jack shit about them. And you wouldn’t want to, either.”
Another voice, a woman sitting at the far end of the table, spoke next. Her eyes, black and glossy like polished obsidian, narrowed at the newcomers. Her voice was cold, almost too calm, as if she had said this a thousand times before.
“The Methuselah… they’re monsters, kid,” she said, her voice carrying a weight of experience, “and I mean that in every sense of the word. Monsters. But they’re not just any monsters. These things—they make the most twisted of us look like children playing with knives. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about anyone. They just care about power. And you know what? They get it. They’ve always had it. They are power.”
The newcomer, a woman with thin lips and an aura of quiet intelligence, stared at her. “And the leader? The Rank 1 Methuselah? What’s her story? What do you know about her?”
The woman’s lips twisted into something resembling a smirk, but it was empty, hollow, like a reminder of the lifelessness that consumed this place. “Ah, the Imperial Empress,” she said, the title dripping from her tongue like venom. “She’s the one in charge now. She’s the one who calls the shots. The real leader. Has been for… what, a millennium now? Maybe more. No one knows for sure. All anyone knows is that she’s been here longer than most of us can even remember. And she’s the one who keeps the rest of them in line, or so the stories go.”
The newcomers exchanged uneasy glances, as if trying to digest this impossible reality. They had heard of figures like her before, creatures of myth and nightmare, but they had never thought such power could exist. Power that could mold the very fabric of existence.
The scarred man, whose face was a grotesque mass of twisted tissue, leaned in, his voice low and dangerous. “The Imperial Empress? She’s more than a title, kid. She’s an idea. You don’t rise to Rank 1 without being something beyond the rest of them. She controls all of them. Even the rest of the Methuselah. If she wanted, she could make this place disappear in an instant. If she wanted, she could rewrite every law of nature and force the stars themselves to obey her.” His laughter was bitter, hollow. “We’ve seen it, kid. Or at least, we’ve heard the stories. When she gives an order, it happens. End of story.”
“But why is she in charge?” the newcomer pressed, her voice trembling slightly, a hint of desperation creeping in. “How did she get that power? What makes her so different from the others?”
A slow, almost imperceptible smile tugged at the corner of the woman’s lips. “How did she get that power? Kid, she’s the strongest of them all. The rest of the Methuselah are nothing compared to her. They answer to her. She controls everything. And as for how? Who knows. You can’t ask someone how they got the power to control reality itself. You just… accept it. The Methuselah don’t just kill. They break things. They tear apart worlds and rebuild them however they see fit. And when they’re done, when they’ve carved out their empire, they sit on thrones of blood and bones, and they laugh at the rest of us.”
The scarred man raised his glass again, this time with a sick, twisted grin. “The only thing we know for sure is that she controls everything. Even the rest of them. You’re lucky, you know? You ended up in District 12. Some might say it’s the ‘least fucked up’ one. But don’t get too comfortable.” He sloshed his drink, watching the tar-like liquid writhe in the glass. “All you’ll ever be here is a pawn. All we are, all anyone is here, is a pawn in the game of the Methuselah.”
The other veteran chuckled darkly. “You think District 13 is bad? Hell, you haven’t seen anything. Districts 1 through 10? Don’t even bother. They’re just—order. Rules. Everyone following orders. Just more tools in the hands of the Methuselah. They don’t even bother with us until we cross their path. All they care about is the capital. District 1. The Methuselah’s home.”
“District 1,” the woman echoed, her voice low. “The capital, the heart of the Empire. It’s where it all comes together. Everything feeds back to District 1. Every district, from here to the farthest reaches of Eternity’s Edge, answers to it. And the people there? You’ll never meet them. Not unless you’re part of their… inner circle. The only people who go to District 1 and come back are the ones who never wanted to come back in the first place.”
A long, unnerving silence followed. The newcomers exchanged glances, their unease mounting, the weight of the truth sinking in. The Methuselah, these god-like beings who controlled everything with an iron grip, were not the only threat they would face here. The entire structure, the entire world of Eternity’s Edge, was built on suffering, on control, on absolute dominance.
“But why are they like this?” one of the newcomers finally whispered, his voice trembling. “Why do they want to control everything? What is it that drives them?”
The woman at the end of the table snorted, her eyes gleaming with a dark, hollow amusement. “Why? Why? Don’t you get it, kid?” she asked, her voice turning sharp, bitter. “The Methuselah are the embodiment of all the evil that’s ever existed. They’ve seen it all. They’ve done it all. There’s no morality, no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ There’s just power. They were born into it. And when you’ve lived for as long as they have, when you’ve bent reality to your will, you don’t care about anything but one thing—more. They want everything. The world, the universe, the multiverse. They want it all.”
“And when you’ve seen all of time unravel before your eyes,” the scarred man added, “nothing has meaning anymore. Nothing but control.”
The newcomers sat back, their eyes wide, their minds racing. The truth of their situation was sinking in. There was no escape from this place. No hope, no redemption, only endless cycles of suffering. The Methuselah weren’t just rulers—they were gods of their own twisted creation. And this was their world.
▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃
The newcomers moved in uneasy silence, their footsteps echoing softly as they traversed through the filthy, disordered streets of District 12. The air was thick with the smell of decay, a foul mixture of rotting meat, stale blood, and something far worse—something that clung to the skin and twisted in the stomach. Above them, the sky was a sickly orange, as though the sun itself was afraid to show its true face. The architecture around them was a macabre mockery of the once-proud buildings that must have stood there centuries ago—crumbled, broken, and coated with thick layers of grime, their once pristine walls now crawling with grotesque vines and parasites that pulsed and shifted like they had minds of their own.
A man in the group, tall and wiry with an air of desperate determination, gagged, his face twisted in disgust. “This… this place…” he muttered, eyes wide as he looked around. “It’s like a nightmare.”
One of the veterans, a haggard woman whose lips were cracked from both age and dehydration, chuckled darkly. “You’re just seeing it now, huh? Just wait ‘til night falls. You ain’t seen nothing yet. This place doesn’t sleep—it waits.”
“Waits for what?” another newcomer asked, his voice trembling, a hand instinctively clutching at his side, as though trying to ward off the feeling of something crawling beneath his skin.
“Waits for the new blood to scream, I guess,” the veteran answered with a laugh, her eyes alight with twisted humor. “But don’t worry. No one’s gonna die here. Not even the ones who beg for it.”
Ahead of them, a street vendor was hawking something in a deep, guttural voice, gesturing toward his cart with eager, trembling hands. The cart was a patchwork of horrors, the contents a grotesque jumble of what could only be described as mutated creatures—part human, part animal, and part something… worse. Skinned, bleeding, and still twitching, they were piled together in a display of obscene abundance. The air was thick with the buzzing of strange, bloated insects, their legs and wings writhing in time with the pulsing, bleeding flesh. A thick, tar-like substance dripped from the cart’s edge, pooling in the gutter, where even the rats dared not tread.
“Fresh meat, fresh meat!” the vendor rasped, his voice cracked like the skin on his withered face. His eyes were wide, too wide, as if they were trying to escape the sockets, and they flicked toward the newcomers with a manic gleam. “Come! Taste the best of what District 12 can offer! Flesh that still moves! Still bleeds!” He cackled, but it was a sound that sent chills down the newcomers’ spines.
One of them, unable to hold back the bile that surged in his throat, stumbled away, turning his head sharply to the side as he vomited onto the cobbled streets. The veteran who had led them through the twisted maze of District 12 just shook her head, the familiar look of disdain curling her lips.
“That’s the reality here,” she said flatly. “That’s what you’ll see if you look hard enough. But it’s nothing, really. Nothing compared to the real hells waiting in the other Districts.”
As they pressed on, the buildings around them grew more monstrous. At first, there had been signs of some twisted semblance of civilization: crooked shops where wares were sold for exorbitant prices, people moving in strange, jerky patterns, sometimes stopping to talk to one another in hushed, unsettling voices. But the further they walked, the more they saw it—the real darkness that existed under the skin of District 12. The streets grew narrower, more suffocating, and the sense of being trapped grew heavier with each passing second.
A man, his face so scarred that it was almost impossible to tell where his skin ended and the layers of soot began, walked past them with a limp. His hands were wrapped tightly in thick, fraying bandages, as though he had tried to amputate his own fingers. He muttered to himself in low, incoherent sentences, his breath labored, as if every step caused him unbearable pain. “Can’t… feel… can’t feel…” he whispered over and over, his eyes glazed and vacant. As he stumbled by, the newcomers caught a glimpse of the gaping wound in his side—a wound that was fresh, still oozing blood, but it did not stop, it did not slow. The blood continued to pour, soaking into his rags, but the man showed no sign of collapse.
“He’s gonna be fine,” one of the veterans said with dark humor. “You get used to it. Ain’t nothing that will kill ya here. We just keep on going, no matter how much you bleed.” She stared after the man for a moment, her expression unreadable, before turning back to the newcomers with a dry smile. “Maybe you’ll be like him soon enough.”
“But that’s… that’s impossible,” one of the newcomers stammered. “How can he… still be alive? That wound—it’s huge! He should be dead by now.”
The veteran scoffed. “You think that matters here? Nothing dies here. You can stab yourself a hundred times, burn your skin off, drown yourself in the muck, and you’ll still be alive. Still be in pain, though.” Her eyes glinted in the dim light, her words as cold as the night that loomed over them. “That’s the fun of it, right?”
As they continued through the district, the disjointed lives of the people unfolded before them. A mother, her face gaunt from hunger, sat on the sidewalk with a child in her lap. The child was missing one leg, the stump wrapped in tattered cloth, and they seemed to be playing a game where the child tried to crawl across the street while the mother called out, her voice hollow. “Come on, come on, just a few more steps, darling. You can do it. We just need to make it to the next feeding line.”
And not far from them, an old man sat with his back against a cracked wall, his face hidden beneath a thick, matted beard. In front of him was a pile of discarded body parts—limbs, twisted, malformed heads, and jagged torsos that had been hacked apart. He was grinning as he sorted through them, arranging them in strange, horrifying patterns, like he was trying to build something, or maybe it was just his hobby to play with death. The stench was unbearable, but the veteran led the newcomers past him without so much as a glance.
“This is District 12,” she said, her voice monotone. “This is what it is. What it’s always been. Some days are worse than others, but it’s always the same. As long as you’re in pain, you’re still here. As long as you’re suffering, you belong.”
A few steps further, they came upon a group of workers in the middle of a gruesome task—chains of men and women laboring in the streets, hauling dead bodies from one pile to the next. Their faces were blank, drained of any semblance of emotion. Their eyes, when they met the newcomers, were as empty as the streets around them, as if they had long since stopped seeing the world around them.
“This is how you get food here,” one of the workers rasped to the newcomers, his voice barely audible. “Bodies, broken bodies… they keep you fed, keep you going. We keep them going, too. Keep everyone alive long enough to suffer, so we all can keep going.”
“How do you escape?” one of the newcomers asked, their voice barely a whisper.
The worker let out a slow, breathless chuckle, as if the question was both absurd and tragic. “Escape? You can’t escape. You never leave. Not from here. Not from this place. Not from Eternity’s Edge.”
And as they turned the corner, they saw the old tower looming overhead, its silhouette a jagged scar against the sky—a monument to their twisted, eternal existence.
The world they had entered was unforgiving, a place where death didn’t exist, but neither did freedom. Only suffering. Only endless suffering.
═════════════════
The scholar’s voice trembled as he spoke, his words sharp but laced with a deep unease. “If we don’t die here—if there is no end to it all, no escape, no release… then what’s the point of all this? The ‘normalcy,’ the routines, the struggles? Why go through all of this fakeness if there’s no end?”
The question hung in the air like a weight, oppressive and dark, but it was met with a response that lacked even a hint of sympathy. The veterans turned their eyes toward him, their gazes distant and knowing, as if they had already been through the motions of that very question long ago. They knew what the scholar had yet to learn.
“Point?” The woman who had spoken to them earlier, the one with the cracked lips and dark humor, leaned in closer, her voice a low rasp that carried the bitter edge of experience. Her breath smelled of something sour and metallic. “There’s no point, genius. No grand reason. Just… endless drifting.”
She waved her hand around, as though painting the picture of the world they lived in. “The Methuselah don’t care about us. They don’t care if we live or die. They don’t care what we do as long as we don’t get in their way. They let us pretend. Let us believe in this twisted version of normality. We’re just… filler. We’re a show. Entertainment for them.”
Her eyes, hollow and gleaming with madness, fixed on the scholar. “You think you’re the first one to ask that question? You think you’re the first to wonder why we keep doing this? Ha!” She laughed, but it was a sound filled with a twisted, raw edge of insanity. “A few millennia ago, someone tried to ask one of them. They begged for a reason. They begged the Methuselah for some kind of answer, some reason to go on, some kind of purpose. And you know what the Methuselah said?”
The veteran leaned in closer, her voice a hiss, as if whispering a secret from the abyss. “They laughed. Laughed and said, ‘If you can’t die, then keep yourselves busy. Build a civilization. Build your little worlds. Do whatever you want, just don’t get in my way. You’re not here for me, you’re here to amuse yourselves. Keep yourself entertained. It’s not my problem.’”
The scholar’s expression faltered, his face betraying disbelief as he tried to process the horror in her words. “But… but that means…”
The veteran’s gaze darkened, her eyes narrowing with a brutal kind of clarity. “It means they don’t give a damn about us. It means we’re not even worth their attention. They’re gods, and we’re nothing. Just… amusements. Living in a never-ending nightmare of our own making.” Her voice dropped lower, becoming almost a whisper. “That’s what they gave us: an eternal hell and the delusion of choice. We can keep pretending that what we do matters, but it doesn’t. We just keep going until the pain becomes familiar. Until the bodies stop being bodies and start being… things. Until nothing is real anymore.”
Another veteran, an older man with a face so scarred it seemed like it had been carved from stone, spoke up in a voice that was unnervingly calm, as if the horror was as mundane as breathing. “The truth is, we’re already dead—all of us. All of us who are still here, still moving, still existing in this godforsaken place. But because we can’t die, we have to pretend. We have to keep up the illusion. We eat, we drink, we fuck, we fight, we worship in our sick little ways. And we build our world, piece by piece. We need it, even if we know it doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
He spat onto the ground, the thick fluid hissing as it hit the pavement, like acid on stone. “The Methuselah don’t care. They gave us freedom from death, and with it, the freedom to rot forever in whatever hell we decide to make. So we do this.” He gestured widely to the decaying streets, the disfigured bodies, the twisted, broken creatures that shuffled aimlessly past them. “This nothingness. We do this because they told us to. And we’re too damn weak to stop. Too afraid to stop.”
The scholar’s eyes widened, his mind reeling as he looked around him, taking in the grotesque, twisted beauty of the district. People were living in this chaos, surviving the madness that had consumed every aspect of their existence. But it wasn’t living, was it? It was a slow, crawling death—one that never ended. A game, as the Methuselah saw it.
“Why don’t they just let us die then?” the scholar whispered, his voice cracking with the weight of the realization. “Why keep us here? Why torment us with this endless existence?”
The woman with the cracked lips smiled darkly, her eyes glinting with the eerie light of someone who had seen the deepest recesses of this hell and had grown too numb to care. “Because, sweetheart,” she purred, “they don’t need us to die. They just need us to break. And when you’re here long enough, you’ll understand that it’s worse than death. Way worse.”
She straightened up, her voice hardening into something colder, darker. “You think the Methuselah want you to beg for death? Nah, they want you to beg for release. But not even that will come. They don’t want you to die. They want you to suffer. Forever. And ever. Until there’s nothing left of you but a husk of memories and broken thoughts.”
Another veteran spoke then, his face a mask of gory scars and unblinking eyes. “You can leave the District, sure, but you can’t leave the Edge. You can never leave this hell. What they’ve done to us… is worse than death. It’s life with no end. It’s eternity with no purpose. That’s the joke. That’s what they gave us.”
The scholar’s stomach churned, but he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t stop his mind from racing as the brutal truth began to sink in. “And what happens… when you can’t even remember what it’s like to be human anymore?” he asked, his voice hollow.
One of the older veterans, a woman with deep lines of pain etched across her face, answered him softly, her eyes almost fond with an air of deep, aching nostalgia. “Then you’re like me. You’re just here. And being here is all you’ll ever know. The rest fades away. Your past… your regrets… they disappear. You forget the names of those you loved, the places you used to go, and the faces you used to see. In the end, all that’s left is the pain. And the knowledge that you will never escape it.”
The scholar stood still, eyes wide, his heart racing, as the horror of their words seeped into his bones. This wasn’t just some twisted game—they weren’t prisoners. They were subjects in a cage that stretched infinitely. And the only thing worse than the pain was the inevitable forgetfulness that would strip away everything that made them human.
The world around him had become an endless nightmare, and they were all living in it—forever.
Before you start reading God’s Protagonist, make sure to read the following:
- Introducing God’s Protagonist: A Dark Fantasy Epic by Fang Dokja [General Info]
- The Purpose of “God’s Protagonist”
- Content and Trigger Warnings for God’s Protagonist
- Why God’s Protagonist is Rated Mature (23+)
- Comprehensive Content and Trigger Warnings for God’s Protagonist
- How God’s Protagonist Works: Major Arcs and Chapter Posting
- Coping with “God’s Protagonist”: Taking Care of Yourself as a Reader
𝐆𝐨𝐝'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭 